Will you then also take the EOC’s recommendations to heart? My point is exactly that – the work culture (which includes lack of flexibility) – is biased against women. Failing to acknowledge this or address it IS chauvinism.

Well, this seems to the be root of our differences: you see this particular issue as bias against women, as sexism – I see it as bias against people who want to work flexibly.

You seem to have a very absolutist position, that there is one factor behind all this and it is prejudice. My position is that there are lots of factors, including prejudice and we should consider their extent, how they work together, and what we can (and should) do about them.

…Or is there more social engineering going on there?

Will you then also take the EOC’s recommendations to heart? My point is exactly that – the work culture (which includes lack of flexibility) – is biased against women. Failing to acknowledge this or address it IS chauvinism.

So the question is, do you use incentives or the law to address the problem? I do think its a problem, incidentally. And how?

I won’t take your word for it though, and to be honest you are looking a little prejudiced.

It was a serious question. How am I prejudiced? Unity said maybe it was hard-wired into us. I pointed out it didn’t seem to be hardwired into other countries. Spain has more than 50% women cabinet ministers. Are they hardwired differently?

There are no alternative explanations other than clutching at straws.

Really? You found none of my alternatives at all possible?

Ok, what about the EOC report, Sex and Power 2007? (my emphasis in bold)

Lack of flexibility at the top of professions often drives women towards setting up their own businesses.

The reality is that unless women can combine work and caring roles successfully, they are unlikely to reach the top in great numbers.[and males are calling for more flexibility too]

Oh look, an alternative explanation to all that white male chauvinism. Will you be dismissing the EOC too, Sunny?

Is this an anglo-saxon thing? Because lots of other countries do quite well in representing women much better at the top. Many are African and Scandinavian. So, like I said, is this some anglo-saxon hardwiring?

I’m not familiar with the cultures and laws of those countries. I won’t take your word for it though, and to be honest you are looking a little prejudiced.

For example, Unity says: because there’s a growing body of evidence that supports the view that base mechanisms for in-group/out-group discrimination are biological – we’re hardwired by evolution to distinguish between people those who are inside our ‘group’ and those on the outside.

Is this an anglo-saxon thing? Because lots of other countries do quite well in representing women much better at the top. Many are African and Scandinavian. So, like I said, is this some anglo-saxon hardwiring?

Is 50% of the population really a minority sub-group incapable of doing anything worrthwhile and/or running companies and/or being as talented as men?

Who argued that? Introducing straw men seems a bit desperate / irrational.

Given some of the excuses you guys are coming up with, it looks like I might have stumbled on to an alternative reality.

But they aren’t “excuses” – they are alternative explanations, none of which are mutually exclusive, nor do they exclude your explanation. Nor do you appear to have considered them.

I don’t think there is any dispute that there is some sexism and racism in the workplace. The dispute is over how much, and what other factors are involved in, for example, only three women being chief executives of FTSE 100 companies.

You seem to be stuck on this idea that such problems described here are entirely the fault of white male employers – by the way, this seems rather prejudiced to me – rather than also being due to the choices / psychological make-up of the individual employee.

If we do not know what the problem is we are unlikely to be able to solve it.

Unity, my immediate reaction to your scenario is that I much prefer the reasons given in B.

Yet the equality bill goes to no lengths to introduce things such as anonymous applications does it? As I said, employers can discriminate far before this “equal candidate” stage and get away with it, how about we just accept that the best people to get the job should get the job, and that means rethinking why it is employers should have access to anything other than relevant skills and experience to select for interviews.

For which, the best advice I can give Lynne, if she is involved in the committee stages, is to gather a wide range of opinion to inform her thinking. At the very least, on the employment side, that would merit talking to ACAS, the Trade Unions and finding herself a good employment barrister to talk over the nuances of the weight of case law that’s accumulated over the years.

I would hope that the lack of role models for boys would have been identified at an early stage in the recruitment process and that the advertising would have referred to it and offered a particular welcome to male applicants.

I’d like to offer you a development of the scenario. The headteacher discovers that the turnover of male staff is far higher than that of female ones. And she is also wondering what to do about Agatha (you remember Agatha, twice passed over for deputy head, but stays ‘cos she lives locally and knows everyone in the neighbourhood, including the school governors) who muses in the staffroom “oh, we do have men here, but they never seem able to settle, do they?” and then winks.

We all know an Agatha (or her brother) – yes, they should be “called out” but I don’t think that our legislators can give us much help with them.

For good reason: no one wants to think that they’ve only got their position “to make up the numbers” – the cousins have been down that road with generally unhappy results.

For equalities legislation to be effective, it is first necessary to have a clear understanding of what the law can or cannot do. Since this is what tends to get lost in the Parliamentary hurly-burly I’d like to bring the discussion back to Lynne Featherstone’s final point. This is precisely the kind of legislation where the Committee stage can be vital – and indeed, the scrutiny function of the Lords.

Not that we’ve offered Lynne any practical suggestions so far…

That analogy is fine for what it is, a demonstration of the arbitrary nature of framing equality in terms of statistical representation within population demographics.

I guess some people don’t want to admit that some white males may just be unconciously sexist to the point that they’d rather work with other males of similar backgrounds. This seems to apply more in tight-knit circles at the upper echelons of professions where personal contacts matter more sometimes than talent.

Yes, in real world scenarios in-group/out-group psychology is going to be a factor, but you have to careful about moving from that idea to one of ‘unconscious sexism’ because there’s a growing body of evidence that supports the view that base mechanisms for in-group/out-group discrimination are biological – we’re hardwired by evolution to distinguish between people those who are inside our ‘group’ and those on the outside. Cultural factors play a major part in shaping how that distinction manifests itself in terms of actions and social interactions, allowing the system to mediated by the prevailing social and cultural environment but the core system, itself, is innate.

Its not necessary that employers are forced to take on women in positions. Only that the law takes away the barrier for women to participate at the top. That is what leftist thinking is about, isn’t it?

Yes, but the way you frame that argument is tremendously important as well, and its that that you’re maybe not seeing, particularly in terms of how this affects peoples moral perceptions of these arguments.

Look, let’s see if I can demonstrate what I mean with a little experiment, even if its not under ideal conditions.

Let’s take Lynne’s primary school recruitment scenario as a starting point…

What I’m going to do is give everyone two versions of the same scenario…

Scenario A

A primary school conducts interviews to fill a teaching position and at the end of the interview process the Headteacher find themselves faced with a choice between appointing a male candidate and a female candidate, both of whom are equally qualified for the job.

Before making their decision, the Headteacher checks the school’s personnel records, realises that it currently has 15 female teachers and only one male teacher and decides to appoint the male candidate as this will make the workforce of the school a little more representative.

The male candidate is offered the job.

—-

Scenario B

A primary school conducts interviews to fill a teaching position and at the end of the interview process the Headteacher find themselves faced with a choice between appointing a male candidate and a female candidate, both of whom are equally qualified for the job.

The headteacher thinks carefully about the needs of the school and its pupils and concludes that many of the boys attending the school would benefit from, and respond well to, having an additional male role model in the school, and decides to the offer the job to the male candidate.

The male candidate is offered the job.

—

And the question I want people to answer – and please try to go on your immediate reaction to each scenario – is simply that of whether you feel, in each scenario, that the headteacher made a morally correct decision in appointing the male candidate?

I’ll explain where I’m going with this after, hopefully, we’ve had a few answers come in…

Nick: We should be treating people as individuals with needs, desires and choices rather than a series of identities with needs. Because people don’t divide well into group identities.

Erm, this French model of pretending that people’s identities have no impact on how they’re treated does not wash with me. And unsurprisingly it always comes from a group that has no real experience of discrimination. People don’t easily divide into group identities, but sometimes people’s identities (whether they choose to be defined by that) does impact them.

There was a Five Live investigation a few years ago when they sent identical CVs to employers, but just switched the name from Muslim/Asian to white/English. When a white/English name appeared on a CV, that group was overwhelmingly called up for an interview.

So yes, discrimination exists. And putting your head in the sand and saying that people don’t fit easily into group identities is somewhat divorced from reality.

Perhaps there are ambitious women who languish in middle management because our tax system isn’t structured well for them, or our system of maternity care discriminates against them,

Right, so there are remedies which can be applied to make it easier for women to progress.

Unity:
There are currently around 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefit in the UK, which about 5% of the voting age adult population, and yet I don’t see anything in the government’s latest welfare reform plans about designating 32 parliamentary seats at the next election only for candidates who’ve been claiming incap and, funnily enough, whenever talk of equality and representation

Oh god, I’ve never heard such terrible analogies. I’ve not said that EVERY sub-group in the country should be represented at every level.

Is 50% of the population really a minority sub-group incapable of doing anything worrthwhile and/or running companies and/or being as talented as men? Given some of the excuses you guys are coming up with, it looks like I might have stumbled on to an alternative reality.

Perhaps I have. I guess some people don’t want to admit that some white males may just be unconciously sexist to the point that they’d rather work with other males of similar backgrounds. This seems to apply more in tight-knit circles at the upper echelons of professions where personal contacts matter more sometimes than talent.

My reasoning is this. If 50% of the population is restricted to about 1-3% in a professional capacity which is supposed to be open to talent and merit, then there are structural problems to why this is happening. It cannot be because women aren’t as talented. Its down to the way work is structured or the culture of the industry.

This is no simple statistical abnormality – this is a situation where half the population may as well not exist.
Its not necessary that employers are forced to take on women in positions. Only that the law takes away the barrier for women to participate at the top. That is what leftist thinking is about, isn’t it?

Way back in the 1980s I saw a job advertised in a women’s group of some kind (publicly funded) for a purely admin back-office post to which they claimed the SDA exemption applied. I thought they were pushing it (not that I was interested in the job) but I can make a case both ways.

That’s still pretty common in the voluntary sector.

But are they? This is what you guys actually need to show. We don’t deny that there is some level of prejudice guiding a handful of employment decisions, but for the most part statistical “abnormalities” (what you think of as problems denoting employer discrimination) are down to personal choice, social context and structures. If that is the real problem, you aren’t going to solve it by demanding that employers find some way of satisfying your statistical requirements.

It would be rather like finding that not enough boys score well on their SAT literacy scores, so demanding that examiners found an equal number of boys with a good score as the girls, or finding some innovating way of scoring them so they came out equal. Meanwhile, the people actually ending up with a poor standard of literacy (whether they are boys or girls) don’t actually get helped. It is not enough to demand the right outcomes, you have got to look at what is actually causing the undesired outcomes rather than just crying discrimination from the off.

ukliberty, yes I didn’t of Dorothy Thompson. Still three in 100 is pretty awful no matter what you think the correct solution is.

But I don’t know what the situation is yet.

So how can we arrive at an appropriate solution?

Over a year old, but this (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6232943.stm) article points out that we have less representation in our Parliament than Iraq!

But again, why is this (and is it a problem)? This could be due to prejudice within the voting population – I seem to recall recent research saying that voters preferred men, and ‘posh’ voices… then of course there are Unity’s points in comment 58.

I don’t disagree with all of this, but what I think it neglects is that there are plenty of problems with society which are *caused* by people using simple group identities.

Which is a fancy way of saying that discrimination exists. People use crude group identities to identify people as being inferior in their eyes. Often it’s race or gender, but by no means exclusively.

And where the problem is based on simple group identities, you’ve then got to take them into account when trying to tackle it.

Way back in the 1980s I saw a job advertised in a women’s group of some kind (publicly funded) for a purely admin back-office post to which they claimed the SDA exemption applied. I thought they were pushing it (not that I was interested in the job) but I can make a case both ways. In the 1990s Lambeth Coucil segregated their Housing Benefit teams by ethnicity (there were enough people on the same job description so that they could do this legally) and reported a significant productivity increase.

I suspect the problem is most acute in the voluntary sector, where the usual reaction of management committee members confronted with an allegation of discrimination by/against staff is to say… I’m outta here!

I stand corrected, there are two female FTSE 100 CEO’s (Clara Furse of the LSE and Marjorie Scardino of Pearson, which incedently owns the FT), and one FTSE 100 Chairwoman (Baroness Hogg of 3i).

” Sunny, I accept that one out of the top hundred FTSE companies is “run by” (the chief executive is) a woman..

Make that two.”

I thought there is only one (Clara Furse of the LSE) since WH Smith was relegated to the FTSE 250. Not that it makes much difference, 2% of the FTSE 100 having female CEO’s is just as pathetic as 1%.

Getting back to the British press’s attitude to women and equality, have a look at the staff of the British press. I believe the FT was the most open to women, but then a new editor came in who changed that. Why are we shocked at the media scoffing anti-discrimination legislation when they are the biggest offenders.

May as well admit it. Yes, I have little faith in some sections of the british people, specifically the section easily led by the tabloid press. In the same way I’d have little faith in some sections of the british people not to become shoplifters were laws against stealing repealed. I’d hardly call laws against stealing oppressive. Anti-discrimination laws have liberated swathes of the population and have been one of the most liberating forces in Britain of the last 40 years.

And any criticisms in recent days I’ve had about what you’re writing about have now been counter-balanced by this excellent point. Well done